Podcasts about militarization of police

Show Notes https://www.rushtoreason.com/show-notes/03-06-2024/

The Survival and Basic Badass Presents: The Militarization Of The Police Join The Email List and Get Badass Gear @ www.preppingbadass@gmail.com  Badass YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/preppingbadass  Stay connected all week by joining The Badass Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/331588903926580  Badass Facebook Page Support The Badass on Patreon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Survival and Basic Badass Presents: The Militarization Of The Police Join The Email List and Get Badass Gear @ www.preppingbadass@gmail.com Badass YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/preppingbadass Stay connected all week by joining The Badass Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/331588903926580 Badass Facebook Page Support The Badass on Patreon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What Police Officers Can Learn From Special Forces. The Militarization Of Police. Special Episode. During his military service he was awarded the Silver Star and three Purple Heart medals. Robert talks about the causes of and need for military style tactics and weapons in civilian law enforcement. Robert Vaughan, retired U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and former Law Enforcement Officer is our guest. He discusses the need for on going Special Forces inspired S.W.A.T. training and why it should be a priority for our communities. Never miss out on an episode of the Law Enforcement Today Podcast subscribe to our free email newsletter, never more than 2 issues a week sent out. Click here and scroll down about halfway. Background song Hurricane is used with permission from the band Dark Horse Flyer. Follow us on the MeWe social media platform. We are on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. In the Clubhouse app look for and follow @LetRadioShow. If you enjoy the show, please tell a friend or two, or three about it. If you are able to leave an honest rating and, or, review it would be appreciated. Be sure to check out our website. Interested in being a guest, sponsorship or advertising opportunities send an email to the host and producer of the show jay@letradio.com.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Marianne Williamson On Rising: DANGEROUS Militarization Of Police Threatens Americans (00:00) Robby Soave: Meta Reported FAUCI CRITIQUE To Feds; More Damning Details From FACEBOOK FILES (09:47) Batya Ungar-Sargon: War In Ukraine Is LOSING International Support; Will The US Follow Suit? (20:54) Pfizer CEO REFUSES To Answer When He Knew Covid Vaccines CAN'T Stop Transmission While At WEF (32:54) Briahna Joy Gray: LYIN' BIDEN Betrays Americans To Shill For Healthcare BARONS (43:30) Robby Soave: DEEP STATE Actors At World Economic Forum SEND THREATS To Elon Musk?! (56:16) Daily Wire Beef HEATS UP; Candace Owens Says She Has PERSONAL INFO On Steven Crowder (01:09:32)

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In this episode: I talk with Beorn from the Stereo app. Find Beorn on Stereo @beorn or IG @StereoBeorn. This is an excerpt from our live talk on 10.7.22 Part 1 of 3 We cover a lot of ground in this episode including term limits, rank choice voting, the drug war vs legalization, and blockchain voting. President Biden in a highly political move pardoned people in federal prison for marijuana charges. This is a really hollow and meaningless act just done to gain headlines and make Biden look progressive when he is the farthest thing from a progressive president. The reason this is such a hollow gesture is that most people in jail for marijuana are tried at the state level. To be in in federal prisoner for marijuana you would need to have been caught smuggling into the country or across state lines. If Biden really wanted to do something of substance, he would have rescheduled marijuana so that it was no longer a "class 1 drug" in the same category as heroin and crystal meth. Another thing he could have done would have been to decriminalize marijuana federally or have made it legal nationwide. Any of these would have had profound impact and would have helped thousands ensnared in our antiquated war on drugs. The class 1 classification is for drugs with no medical use. Well, we have seen a ton of information come out in the last decade about how hemp (cbd) and marijuana (thc) have a multitude of medical uses. Not to mention California legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996. This would seem to me to set a precedent for rescheduling if not full-blown national legalization. The entire election system in the US needs to be overhauled and it seems Blockchain technology offers a great mechanism to do this. Blockchain voting would offer a solution to many of the ills facing our current political system including access to voting, election security, election transparency, and greater citizen involvement. First off, blockchain provides a record of each step in a process which would prevent election fraud and would secure our elections from ballot tampering. Second, with our voting being done online more people would have a chance to vote. Third, we could open the process and provide greater transparency, so the people were actually able to vote on every issue/measure and remove the element of secrecy that corrupt politicians hide under. Too often politicians will pass some shady bill at midnight on Thanksgiving or Christmas knowing nobody is paying attention. I say we need to make voting day a national holiday and move toward greater transparency with the help of blockchain technology. Psylocibin mushrooms are showing very promising potential in the treatment of a number of mental health issues from ptsd to depression. It is time we moved to a more progressive drug policy in this country. All prescription psych meds were derived from LSD when it was being studied in the 1950s before it was criminalized. Who knows what type of progress we would have made on mental illness if this research was not stopped. I believe it is time we allow research to resume. President Nixons head aid announced on his death bed that the Nixon administration had created the war on drugs so they "could arrest blacks for heroin and hippies for marijuana". If you get a felony, you can never vote again, so the drug war was used as a tool in political warfare. Thanks for tuning in, if you are digging it please share Merch Store https://dv8-8.creator-spring.com/ Link to More of My Content https://1drv.ms/w/s!An39_-tw4s0djCxLyA7PQIjWQeRp?e=4X6dDT --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/andanotherthingwithdave/message

MAIN EPISODE: This week, the talented hosts of the film comedy podcast, First Prize Films join the cinematic roundtable to unpack RoboCop from 1987.Join us as Blake and Dave unpack the all too relevant themes embedded in Paul Verhoeven's dark satire. Set in the near future, Detroit is overrun with crime and in this version of America, corporations fund and arm the police with high-tech weapons. Taking advantage of a fallen officer, Murphy, they transform the remnants of his body to construct a super soldier, RoboCop. This walking tank is designed to suppress criminals and uphold the rule of law, but what does that mean to the humanity of the city and more importantly, the man inside the metal suit.Catch Blake and Dave on their podcast, First Prize Films.Support Cinedicate on PatreonConnect with Cinedicate on these social platforms!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cinedicate/Twitter: https://twitter.com/cinedicate/Discord: https://www.cinedicate.com/discord Get bonus content on Patreon Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anita Stanley is a member of the Pathways to Peace committee of Albany Women Against War. She discusses their efforts opposing the militarization of the police with Mark Dunlea of Hudson Mohawk Radio Network.

Dr. Dan and Sheriff Palmer will discuss the COVID-19 lock downs and limitations of individual freedom.National Police Force: Protector Of Tyrants (2 of 3)National Police Force: Protector Of Tyrants (3 of 3)

Dr. Dan and Sheriff Palmer will discuss the COVID-19 lock downs and limitations of individual freedom.National Police Force: Protector Of Tyrants (1 of 3)National Police Force: Protector Of Tyrants (3 of 3)

Dr. Dan and Sheriff Palmer will discuss the COVID-19 lock downs and limitations of individual freedom.National Police Force: Protector Of Tyrants (1 of 3)National Police Force: Protector Of Tyrants (2 of 3)

Matt Kibbe sits down with Thaddeus Russell, founder of Renegade University, to discuss the contributions made to American culture by libertines, lawbreakers, troublemakers, and miscreants. They also talk about how the progressive movement was built on many of the problems progressives are protesting today, including imperialism, police militarization, and racism.

Matt Kibbe sits down with Thaddeus Russell, founder of Renegade University, to discuss the contributions made to American culture by libertines, lawbreakers, troublemakers, and miscreants. They also talk about how the progressive movement was built on many of the problems progressives are protesting today, including imperialism, police militarization, and racism.

Robert Vaughan, retired U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and former Law Enforcement Officer is our guest. During his military service he was awarded the Silver Star and three Purple Heart medals. Robert talks about the causes of and need for military style tactics and weapons in civilian law enforcement. He also discusses the need for on going Special Forces inspired S.W.A.T. training. Background song Hurricane is used with permission from the band Dark Horse Flyer.  

10 July 2017 - Today I was joined by all three of the new associates:  Michele LeSure, David Paquette & Joel Dent. They are all bringing new perspective and strengths to the show so I am reveling in the opportunity to showcase them. Will is still on vacation but he is back next week with, hopefully, some interesting stories to tell. Michele starts off the show with a brief introduction of herself and then her nomination for the Hopping Mad Lying Liar Lie of the Week - Donald Trump. He claims, in some truly twisted ways, to respect women but his actions show us what he really thinks. This week it was revealed that the women who are part of the White House staff, those who work most closely with the President, are paid far less than their male counterparts. Additionally, the Trump White House is far more male dominated than was the Obama White House. No surprise there but now we have evidence. I countered with Trump failing to mention or notice the only female astronaut in the room, Sandy Magnus, when he was signing an executive order establishing a related space commission and while thanking and commenting on the three male astronauts who were there. Trump not only does not value or hear women, he completely erases them.  David followed next with some information on healthcare and American exceptionalism. He introduced a concept called "duct taping" which is a single number which can be seen to encapsulate a wide variety of other seemingly unrelated elements. This, he explained, is why the CIA uses maternal morbidity as a CIA Fact Book statistic. I promise you, you are going to be depressed when you hear where the US falls in the ranking of maternal morbidity. I'm still on trade this week. I get into some detail on the upcoming NAFTA 2.0 negotiations and what you can expect to see there. Additionally, I touch on the brand new (spit in Trump's eye) in-principle trade agreement between Japan and the European Union. They call it, "Cars for Cheese" but this is going to be an enormous and, apparently, forward looking deal. It will take some time to negotiate but this is the first hard evidence that the world is reshaping its relationships into a new structure without either the US or the post-Brexit UK at the center. This really, really isn't a good thing for American business. Joel and Michele close out the show with a sobering discussion about the militarization of the police. Dr. Victor E. Kappeler, of Eastern Kentucky University, has a paper out called A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing, which ties the origins of modern police forces back to slave patrols. It's chilling. Joel and Michele make this concept present by tying it to the murder of Philando Castile and modern policing tactics and mindset. They also discuss the difference between a military action and a police action as well as why this is becoming an evermore gray area in the US. We do not have an interview this week so there is no Extra Mad. I expect all will be back to normal once Will is returns safe and sound. He is missed! Carrots! - Arliss

Behind the Headlines features a portion of a Reform Conference panel featuring LEAPs Diane Goldstein. The Drug War and the Militarization of Police Practices, plus Drug War Data Ming offers some real facts behind recently released Colorado crime stats.

Jacqui Ford: Welcome to Your Best Defense Podcast. My name is Jacqui Ford, and I’m here in the office today with my friend, Dax Ewbank. Dax, how are you doing today?   Dax Ewbank: Just great. Glad to be here.   JF: Thank you for coming. I think we’re going to talk about, overall, what’s going on in the world today and kind of a broad overviewing topic of the militarization of police and how it’s changing the world that we live in.   DE: Absolutely.   JF: And not just within our communities, but within the judicial system and what is oftentimes referred to as the “justice system”. How it’s maybe lacking and doing more harm rather than good.   DE: And it’s happened in recent history, I think, because I’m not that old. I was a high-schooler in the 90s, and I can remember, in our small town, our relationship with our small-town police department was much different than anything that I see today with people—how they relate to the police. Back then, we were the typical teenagers. We’d run around, cause problems, party, and all those kinds of things, and the cops were there, but we knew them by name, they knew us by name, and the biggest threat they would have that would really keep us in line was that they’d go tell our parents what we were up to.   JF: Right?   DE: And it worked. And that was the kind of relationship that we had with them. Now, if they needed to arrest somebody, they could. But that rarely happened, and most of the time, the way they kept the community safe was by knowing people. I can still remember one of those guys that literally walked the main street and checked the doors, kind of that old school policing that you read about now but don’t really see anymore. And just in the last 20-25 years, we’ve seen a radical change in the personality of the police and especially that relationship between the police and the public. I think they still try to maintain that “we’re here to help” PR. But when we start to look at—“How do I really feel around a cop? How does the general public really feel around a cop?”—it doesn’t have that same “I’m going to run to you when I’m in trouble” kind of attitude. It’s become more of a “If all else fails, this is the nuclear option”. And it seems like an unfortunate thing, because these are civil servants, and the ideal situation is that these are heroes that will step into a violent situation and put themselves at harm in order to bring peace to whatever the situation is in their community. Yet, because of the way law has changed, because of the way policy has changed, they’ve become more and more of an aggressive force where they’re stepping in before anything violent has happened, before anybody’s been harmed, before any fraud has taken place, before any crime is even known about. We’re seeing this thing where law enforcement is stepping in and kind of initiating an aggressive interaction with the public.   JF: That makes it kind of scary now to interact with law enforcement, and I have this kind of conversation with clients often, and with friends. What do we do moving forward? My law enforcement friends say they feel it’s a war on the police and that the whole world is coming against them. So they’re feeling threatened, and the communities are feeling threatened, and we’re all walking around in fear. This can’t be good for society, and I don’t know where the answer is. I don’t know if we have more police brutality now or if we have more awareness of it because of social media and everybody having a video camera in their purse and pocket. And does it really matter? I don’t know if it does. I don’t know if it makes me feel better that it’s increasing or that it’s always been like this, and now everybody just knows about it, so now we’re offended. I’m not comfortable with either one of those responses, and I don’t know how, as a society, we move forward. And being on the other side of the “us against them”, I’m generally perceived as being very anti-law enforcement. People generally believe that I just hate them. And I think that people that know me well enough know that clearly that’s not true and I have lots of law enforcement in my family. But I do hold them to a level of standard greater than I would hold a regular civilian. I think that you have to.   DE: You have to, especially in our environment because law enforcement is a position created by government. So the policy defines what they are. Whatever government policy is created, that’s what defines what a cop is and what a cop can do. And ultimately, that is what defines the relationship between that created entity and the public. I tend to think that the abuse has gotten worse, especially from the violent, where the police are being more aggressive—anecdotally and from studies that I’ve read (some Radley Balko and other research that I’ve looked at). Let’s look at what used to consist of a felony warrant, or serving up a warrant, or a search warrant. I read a story not too long ago, where it was basically one or two cops would show up—one, if they didn’t think it was going to be a problem, and two if they did. Now look at what it looks like. That was in the ‘70s, and it was a cop telling a story about how he used to roll up, and if the guy answered the door, they’d arrest him, and if he didn’t come to the door, they’d call for backup and go on in and get him and have one or two cops come with him.   JF: Now they’re showing up 20 deep with a squad team.   DE: And that’s on the first call, so they’re doing that as the go-to instead of the last resort, so they’ve been equipped for that. They’ve been trained to do that, so that’s what they do. And they’ve been authorized to that.   JF: That, I think, is really the core problem, and if they are granted this ability to enforce the laws, and that power comes from the government, and the government is training them, and the government is blessing their actions, then we really do have a government problem and not just a cop problem.   DE: So when people say, “Oh, you just think all cops are bad,” I say, “No, actually I think the job of cop has become bad,” and what I mean by that is that the statutorily created job of cop has become a bad thing in our society—not that the guy who has the job of cop is necessarily a bad person. I think there are a lot of cops out there who want to do that right thing and have that idealistic notion of what it means to be an officer of the peace or a person that provides that service that we want in our communities. But because of how the job has been defined, it’s almost impossible for them to fulfill that ideal.   JF: Well, and today’s law enforcement officers testify regularly that that, in fact, isn’t their job. That they’re not here and designed to serve the communities. I was kind of challenged by one to “Find me a law enforcement officer who thinks that’s his job,” and I started watching and looking at police cars and state trooper cars in our communities and other communities, and what you see here is not “Oklahoma City Police, here to protect and serve”. You see “Oklahoma City Police, criminal law enforcement”.   DE: And it says on their cars, “We serve with pride”, which is a whole different statement than “To protect and serve”.   JF: Absolutely. And their training now is so different. It saddens me to listen to law enforcement officers talk to me about their attitudes and the way they are trained to approach cars. In just a basic traffic stop, our law enforcement officers are trained to believe their lives are in danger and this person is likely going to kill them. The regular, average Joe that they’re pulling over for a traffic violation is being greeted by a law enforcement officer ready, willing, and prepared in that moment to shoot and kill them. That’s terrifying for someone who maybe gets pulled over more than the average person.   DE: That right there, you talk about how many interactions law enforcement officers have with the public a year, every day. And when every one of those interactions is approached with that mentality, what do you expect to be the approach to that? Is that going to foster a good relationship? Is that going to foster understanding? Is that going to foster anything other than contempt?  I mean, that’s what it’s going to do. If I approached everybody with that, I wouldn’t make a lot of friends. So this idea that there’s a war on cops and this idea that the public has that cops are at war against us is all driven by policy. It’s all driven by this idea that government can grant cops this authority to do things other people don’t have the authority to do, which in and of itself is a philosophical mistake. If we believe that we live in a government that gets its authority from the people, then that government can only have the authority that the people had in the first place to give. So a lot of people say, “When we see these police brutality videos and things,” inevitably there’s someone who says, “The kid shouldn’t have done this” or “The kid shouldn’t have done that” or “The kid shouldn’t have talked back to the cop”—and so they end up justifying this behavior, and they throw in the whole “Well that cop doesn’t know if this guy wants to kill him or not” and you’ve seen all of those conversations pop up. But the bottom line is that it’s a very simple standard that needs to be applied. And the standard is, if I as not a cop were in the same situation, would I be morally justified to do what the cop did? If the answer is no, then the cop is just as wrong as I would have been in the same situation, but somehow because of our kind of warped view of what a police officer is and what they’re allowed to do, when we look at that, we look at it differently. We say, “Because he has a badge and gun, it means he gets to do things that I wouldn’t get to do.” All of the sudden, you’ve now created another class of citizen. A class of citizen that’s protected with different rights than the rest of us, and it shows. Look at how they park their cars and how they drive their cars. They get to wear their guns on the outside of their pants; the rest of us don’t get to do that. All of these things define this cop as a different kind of citizen than a regular person. The thing we really need to start thinking about: Is that really the kind of world we want to live in? Because that is, by definition, a police state.   JF: I think a lot of the justifications for this, as I’ve seen it in my career, is… People come in—a higher class of clientele, if you will, generally white, middle class, privileged—and their rights have been violated by a police officer. They or their child has been arrested and experienced some of the most horrifying things a person can experience at the hands of local law enforcement and being taken to our fine Oklahoma County Jail, which is not equipped to house animals, let alone live human beings. And they come out, just outraged, with righteous indignation at “How this could happen to me?” I often find myself telling them, “Because you were okay with it happening to these other people because of who they were, and they were a smaller citizen in your mind, and they maybe deserved it.” And we talk about criminal defense lawyers and why it is we do what we do, and I’ve always shared if I don’t protect the fringes, the weakest of our class, then how can I protect those of us who are not living in the fringes? I think what’s happened is, we’ve all been okay with the poor, and the minorities, and the poverty-stricken to have their communities run like a warzone. And when their communities are run by military-style law enforcement that is set up every day to arrest, charge, and imprison its citizen, that eventually those citizens will be locked up, and where do they go? Now all of the sudden, it’s beating on the back door of middle-class America, and now they want to care. So my struggle is, what do we do? How do we move forward? I’m not sure that we get to take steps back. It’s 2015, and we’ve given this power. How do we take it back? And with any government bureaucracy—any committee that’s designed to never solve its problem—   DE: The solution is always to make the bureaucracy bigger.   JF: Right.   DE: If we just had more power, then we’d be able to solve the problems that we have.   JF: Because if we solve the problem, then we’re out of the job. So there’s really no incentive to solve the problem, and I think that’s how we end up with a million agencies beginning with “D” and ending in “S”, and everybody’s got their acronym, yet none of our problems are being solved. And I don’t know how we step back in our relationship with government law enforcement and say “Stop. No war” without almost a revolution, right? That’s what’s required to affect serious change sometimes, and that’s a scary concept to me. I think it’s a scary concept to a lot of us to think that the bubble’s going to explode. How do we bring it down to something that’s manageable?   DW: I’m a little more optimistic, actually, about what we can do. The idea that we can make change without pitchforks and riots on the street. The fact of the matter is, people have to be educated, first of all, to understand the appropriate role of government, the appropriate role of a police officer, and to be able to see it appropriately. The other part of it is, none of these agencies can operate without money. Fortunately in the law enforcement world, a lot of that money comes from the drug war. What we’re seeing nationwide is a change in the ideology and the way people look at marijuana, for one thing, and if we see those laws begin to change is that law enforcement policies are going to change along with it. That money, the cartel money, the cash, the forfeiture money they get—people are starting to see that it just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t work. And see? That’s why I believe that when law enforcement is violent in the fringes, people just kind of let it go. But what we’re seeing is that they’ve used up the money—all the poor people are kind of broke.  I used to be a pastor, and I dealt with lots of poor people, you know, people that didn’t have a lot, and their interactions with law enforcement—you could see that they were being milked for everything they had.   JF: It’s the war on the poor.   DW: Yeah, if they got pulled over because their tag was out on their car, their car got taken away from them. Now, if I got pulled over and my tag was out, the cop would tell me to go home and get a new tag. Right? He’d write me a ticket and say, “Get this taken care of.” But my poor friend who’s living in Section A housing, if he gets pulled over, his car’s impounded, and before you know it, it costs more to get it out than the car’s worth, and now it’s just not his car anymore.   JF: And he’s gone to jail, lost his job, and probably lost his apartment…   DW: I remember a story of a gal who got in trouble right after a divorce for writing some hot checks on a joint account with her husband, and she got pinned with it—about $800 worth of hot checks, which turned into about $5,000 worth of court fees and everything else that she ended up owing back. She’s getting arrested every week for a warrant, and a lot of the times, these things weren’t legitimate. Like, she had paid the bill, but the computer record in the cop’s car wasn’t up to date, so they arrested her anyway. She’d spend the night in jail, she’s have to go home, and then the next morning they’d say, “Oh yeah, you’re right. See you later.” It’s because, in that situation alone, the DA gets the money off of those hot checks. So he’s using that law, which everybody thought was a great idea to help fund the DA offices by letting them keep the money from these hot checks. Well what they did was render them monetizing poor people who wrote hot checks and turning it into this cycle where they’re continuously in the system and continuously owing money. And then guess who are the last people to get made right in that situation?   JF: The actual person the check was written to.   DE: Exactly.   JF: The victim is the last person the government cares about.   DE: And so, all of policy—and it goes down to the policing, because ultimately the cop was getting the girl in for the warrant, or whatever—so that policy ends up creating this literal war on the poor, just taking everything they can get to fund their departments, fund their offices, do everything they can.  The drug war—you add that on top of it—the civil asset forfeiture, which is a derivative of the drug war.   JF: Which is clearly policing for profit. Nobody can say it’s not. Law enforcement’s not even saying it’s not. They want that money, they want it to stay with them, and they want to use it to continue the war on drugs, to continue to arrest more people.   DE: Right. And they’ll blatantly say it. “We have to have the ability to take people’s property when no crime was committed. Otherwise, we won’t be able to fund our addiction.” I just read a quote the other day from a law enforcement person, where that was their defense of that policy. “If we can’t literally steal things from people who have committed no crime, then we’re not going to be able to do our jobs.” And I’m like, “What really is your job then?”   JF: And that’s definitely the problem, right? What is the job of law enforcement, and it’s a full-circle argument where they do this dance all day.   DE: Right. And the policy again has created an adversarial relationship, and it’s born of bad philosophy in the minds of people that we expect that government has the right to authorize law enforcement to steal your stuff, which was never, ever in the minds of anybody who created this country. It wasn’t this idea that, arbitrarily, just based on a hunch, that I could just take your stuff. The constitution specifically forbids the government from being able to do that, and yet here we are.   JF: It’s happening every day.   DE: Every day. Billions of dollars.   JF: And it’s not really drug money—it’s drug money from fellow citizens.   DE: Well, don’t get me started. I don’t even care if it is drug money. Who’s the victim? That’s the question. There isn’t one. The victim is the person who is being victimized by law enforcement. That’s the victim. So we’ve created, literally, a situation where the government is preying on the people. And when I say I’m optimistic, I mean, I’m not thrilled with where we’re at now, but then I see things from people like Kyle Loveless with the civil asset forfeiture reform. Kyle and I don’t really agree on a lot of stuff—he probably didn’t even vote for me.   JF: Fair enough. I’m not sure that Kyle and I agree on a lot of things, either, but we do agree on civil asset forfeiture reform.   DE: Right, and because when he looks at it, he’s like, “Man, something doesn’t look right here,” and it appeals to his natural sense of justice. No, this is not justice.   JF: Doesn’t even pass the sniff test.   DE: Right. It’s just like, “No, really. This can’t be what we do.” But the more you dig into it, not only is it what we do, but what we do is a lot worse than this.   JF: Right.   DE: When I see people like that, what it tells me is that he has support. People are beginning to support him. You see, laws don’t change what happens out on the street. Laws don’t change the people; people change the law. So the laws will reflect what the public is ready to expect. And I think we’re starting to see, with marijuana decriminalization, is that the people are starting to see—the country, Colorado and Oregon and all of these places—are seeing positive effects from a freer market and taking that market away from the drug cartel. Doing so is creating a lot of good in their communities. I think if you do that—the civil asset forfeiture reform—we’ll start to see some reeling back of this police state. You know, at some point when they become so aggressive, people start to feel the pain. And at that point is when they’ll say they don’t like this.   JF: So you’ve still got hope?   DE: Yeah.   JF: We can hold on to your hope, then.

DE: Every day I read a story, or see a video, or read a new study just to see that, you know, it really is pretty bad. And the so-called “Land of the Free” that we live in is really not so free. It’s a marketing term more than it is an actual description.   JF: Right.   DE: But the ideal is still there, and I think people are waking up to it in a lot of ways.   JF: I think people are waking up to it now, too. And it’s unfortunate that it took it getting so bad that it ended up in the back doors of everyday regular citizens to finally get jazzed up. If that’s what it takes to start making a legitimate change in our communities, both on our side—meaning when I say “our side”, I don’t mean the criminal side, as much as I’m a criminal defense lawyer, but I defend the people, right—and on the people’s side and citizens versus law enforcement, it would just be an incredible world to live in that it wasn’t like that, that it wasn’t so inherently adversarial at every single encounter.   DE: Well, and it’s not only adversarial, but it’s fraudulent. And so, here we have this system that’s supposed to administer justice, but then you go and look at the court dockets, and how many people there actually have a victim? How many people actually victimized somebody by what they did? And how many of them are on there for some—the only person they victimized was the State itself by—   JF: I offended the dignity of the State of Oklahoma…   DE: Right. By not turning my turn signal on or something like that, right?   JF: And now that should be an arrestable offense.   DE: And that kind of stuff—it makes me think that there’s just a bunch of crazy people out there, because the Sandra Bland thing happens in Texas, right? And the rationale given for pulling her over was that she didn’t use her turn signal, then it turns into this stereotypical kind of police brutality encounter, which ends up with her death in the jail. And then, not a week or two later, Oklahoma City Council’s response to that seems to be, “You know what? We need to make it easier for our cops to pull people over for not signaling when they turn.”   JF: Because clearly enough people don’t die in the Oklahoma County jail.   DE: Yes, and clearly, this cop is being questioned about the legality of pulling Sandra Bland over for not signaling, and we need to make sure that our cops don’t have to face that kind of scrutiny. And what in the world does that create in the minds of the public?   JF: It really is crazy! Right? And you sit there, and I read them every day, too, and I get on social media, and I read newspapers, and I try to keep myself really informed, but I find myself pulling my hair and thinking I can’t be the smartest person in the room! I just know that I’m not. So who are these people running our world?   DE: Right. And here we have this philosophical discussion, right? And so, I’m trying to put myself into your shoes because the discussion you and I are having right now is full of solutions. I mean, we’re looking at education. And it’s also full of respect for the actual role of a police officer.   JF: Well, sure.   DE: I mean, in my mind, it is.   JF: I don’t want my police officers to have to be, number one, trained and actually be in fear of being murdered on a traffic stop. I wouldn’t want to live in that environment, either.   DE: Right, but I think, on the other hand, I can imagine when you’re in front of the system and trying to navigate a client through that system, it’s a very different conversation—   JF: It is a very different conversation.   DE: Because it’s not based in reason. It’s based in the statutory law that’s made by crazy people who make laws like “You need to signal one hundred feet before you change lanes. Otherwise, a man with a gun is going to pull you over and assume that you’re going to try to kill him.” I mean, because that’s the situation.   JF: And when you die in jail three days later, the world will say it’s your fault because you should have signaled.   DE: So here we are having one conversation, and if you sat a police officer in the room with us, he could join the conversation and add to it. There would be a lot of just really great, reasonable solutions come out of it. However, you move this conversation to the courtroom, and now all of the sudden, it becomes this unreasonable thing that’s detached from reality, and its motives are completely suspect. So you don’t trust it, and you’re just praying that it doesn’t kill you. Literally. And something tells me that this isn’t the system that our forefathers envisioned.   JF: Certainly. You would hope not, right? And it’s sad. My clients go through this process afraid of the known, afraid of the unknown, and more often than not, I hear myself saying, “Nobody’s telling you this is fair, but I’m telling you this is legal.” And we have conversations with juries, you know? We’ve got a no-jury nullification. Why I can’t argue jury nullification is the most obscene thing in the entire world, because if we have a crazy law that, in application, is affecting the community in a manner we know it was not designed, then why then should the community—the actual citizens—be able to say no more?   DE: How about not even a crazy law? How about a law that, on the facts, apply, but in the spirit, don’t? And let the community decide, right? So you bring a guy who, the facts of the law all say that he’s guilty of breaking the law, but the jury can sit there and look at the extenuating circumstances and say, “You know what? We don’t care. We acquit.” And that’s the whole idea of our system of government is that it never assumes that the lawmakers were all-knowing and all-powerful—   JF: And able to see every possible outcome.   DE: That’s right. And so that’s why the power was given to a jury, but also that jury wasn’t given a power that can create precedents. So one guy can let go of a law, and another guy can get convicted of the same law based on the standards of a community, which is represented by the jury. And you say, “Well, that’s subjective,” and yeah, it is subjective because the only law that isn’t subjective is the law of gravity. The law of—the physical science laws. And nobody has to enforce those laws; they enforce themselves. But when we’re trying to live in a just society, when we’re trying to maintain justice and make sure people aren’t victimized, that’s upon us to put some effort into it. We need to have some flexibility to do that because the situations are different. And like you said, for it to be forbidden, for you to tell the jury that that’s their right is ridiculous. It’s not justice at all. It doesn’t serve justice at all.   JF: It’s the imbalance of power, and I think it kind of goes back to what you said. They can only have as much power as we give them, and we can’t give them more than what we have, so we’ve got to start taking the power back.   DE: And power, in my philosophy, is born of dependency. You know, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you. So if one hand on the body is feeding you, and another hand is beating you, you might not fight the hand that’s beating you because you’re dependent on that other hand to be fed. So government knows this; they know how to establish their power. However, when we become more self-sufficient, when we start taking care of our own communities—little things like doing our own charitable things, getting out to know people—the hand of force becomes a little more inappropriate. We begin to see it as something we don’t want. So, for instance, right now if a lady were making tortillas or something on the side of the road and selling them, literally a cop could walk up and shut her down. And if she resisted, he could lock her up for making tacos without the proper paperwork.   JF: And we see it with the little kids in their lemonade stands. It’s happening. These aren’t extreme examples; they’re not theoretical. It’s actually happening.   DE: To me, it looks ridiculous. Why not just let her sell those tacos or whatever she’s doing?   JF: Why can’t I assume the risk to take the taco off a truck?   DE: But the other question is, when I see that happen, why don’t I step in and stop it?   JF: Well, you know why. Because you’re getting arrested, too.   DE: Right. And nobody will support me because we’re all a little dependent on the system. And we’re all a little bit afraid that we don’t have each other’s back, too. And, you know, my life’s pretty good, so why would I want to get caught up in your drama? So what that does, that apathy just begins to create more room for the state to do the things they do. And they start with the poor, the marginal. You know, every population that is oppressed is some population the rest don’t care about that much. That’s where the roots of state power are established. So if you look in Oklahoma, the homosexual population, or the Muslim population, or the minority population, the drug users—these are people who are marginalized in some way, and when they’re oppressed, people don’t really care, because they’re not me.   JF: And it would never happen to me because I’m not black, I’m not gay, and I’m not poor, or whatever.   DE: Exactly. But what we don’t realize is that, by tolerating that or allowing the state to entrench itself with force into our communities—that force at some point, if you come up against it, you’re not going to have a chance. And nobody’s going to be there to back you up, either.   JF: Well, and it’s tough to defend yourself. My clients learn the hard way that innocence costs extra. We say it with a smile on our face, but it’s a fact. “I’m falsely accused. Can’t you just call the judge?” No, I can’t. It doesn’t work that way, and it’s not meant to continue profiting on the back of bad policies, but I find myself—if I’m really honest, I am really part of the system, and law enforcement doesn’t want to call me part of the system. But I remind them all the time that I’m law enforcement, too. I enforce the law against the government while the government enforces it against the people. But it’s a sad truth that the innocent person has to pull me up to go defend themselves more than the guilty guy who wants to just go in, get a good deal, and get out of town. It doesn’t seem like it should be right until you understand that the justice system is an unjust system, and to get the right result requires ten times the work and a lot more resources—judicial resources.   DE: And everything is pitted against the innocent person, even down to what we talked about before with the jury not being allowed to consider anything but the law. Or the facts of the case. They can’t look at the law and say, “We don’t like this law. It doesn’t apply.” They’re instructed not to do that, in fact, which to me is like, we do we even have a jury? Why not let the judge decide? But you do create that kind of…where the innocent person is at the disadvantage. Where it’s a lot quicker and cheaper to plead something you didn’t do and go on with your life.   JF: It’s a terrible reality of the criminal court system.   DE: And it’s something we need to let people know about and work on changing. We live in a new age of information. Like you said, if you’re not aware if the police violence is worse today or if we just know about it more? We do know about it more. It’s easier to get the information, and it’s also easier to get the information out. Take for instance, that civil asset forfeiture hearing that we went to, we had quite a few people show up that, in the past, before the internet, nobody would have shown up to that thing unless they were personally invited by—   JF: Somebody in the inner crowd.   DE: Right. And they would have had it at the Tulsa Police Academy, and the Police Academy would have rah-rahed their idea, and it would have gotten done. But because they can get information out to people and because people begin to see these stories, and to read these things, and to understand, I think that the human mind is a rational engine. And when it’s presented with truth that contradicts the paradigm that it’s living in, it really doesn’t like that, and it will deal with it and it will change how it sees the world in order to accommodate that information. So getting that information out to people is absolutely the most powerful thing you can do. It’s more powerful than passing a law, especially when you’re trying to pass a law in an environment where it’s not going to get passed. The goal should never be to pass the law. The goal should always be to change minds and to use the opportunity of the public battle, of the hearing, to present a truth and to get that into people’s minds so it begins to break the—I call them mental firewalls.   JF: Fair enough. I like that.   DE: So we live in these constructs in our minds, and most of them were given to us by somebody else.   JF: Parents, teachers, pastors…   DE: Yeah, these are constructs that we’ve been given. It creates our culture. Most of them we didn’t create on our own. So we don’t know why we think this way; we don’t know why a cop has more authority than a regular person. They just assume that’s the way it is because that’s the way it’s always been, but then when you start planting little nuggets like, well, is a cop a human being? Yeah? Well, where does a cop get these rights? Is he a special kind of human being? Does he get special rights from God? When you start to logically work these things out, all of the sudden, it doesn’t make sense. And this thing that I’ve held as true and as part of my identity now has a glaring contradiction logically. The human mind will not deal with that; it will either resolve it by changing its mind or it will find some way to deal with it like through drugs and alcohol. One of the funny things is, when you start talking about drug policy—we’ve been so enamored with this idea that drugs are bad and the drug wars have just cause—that when you start to challenge people on it, it’s like you’re challenging their religion. It’s a sacredly held idea that “just say no” and all of these ideas they grew up with. But when you start to work through things logically, and it starts to not make sense, I like to say that they’ll actually develop a drug problem getting over their drug problem. Because they only have one of two choices. They either have to accept the reality and adjust their frame of mind accordingly, or they have to figure out a way to cope with the cognitive dissonance, and drugs and alcohol actually work pretty well for that. So they can anesthetize themselves to the cognitive dissonance.  And so, kind of in my worldview and in what I do, it’s a lot easier for me because I live in that worldview and that philosophical, real world solution where I can just spout off ideas and people can listen to them. Sometimes they get them, and sometimes they don’t. But at the end of the day, the world changes just in little bitty increments versus you who have to go up in front of a judge and convince somebody, not according to reason, not according to logic, not according to right and wrong, but according to the law, which may have been written by crazy people who don’t even have a connection to the cultural context that this case is being presented within. And that’s a much different kind of skillset. I don’t envy the stress that it has to bring—especially with a person like you who I’ve heard speak about issues and see as an activist. Having to reconcile those two worlds has definitely got to be a challenge.   JF: It certainly is, but I think we’re doing it. I always say, “Be the change you want to see,” right?  And as much as there are many days I want to go bury my head in the sand, and plead ignorance, and turn up the music, and not pay attention to reality, I think what we have to do, and what we’re doing, and what I appreciate from you, for you helping us do it today, is educating people and keeping the conversation alive—not just when it’s hot, not just when the senate meetings are happening, but keeping the conversations alive and in the forefront. Because that’s what I think is how we change people’s minds, too. It’s the whole ‘90s version of Rock the Vote. I remember getting empowered and inspired to be informed by MTV! And, thank goodness, because from that, at a very young age, I rocked the vote in my little community. And I think Anna, my assistant, will tell you that I’m the reason she registered to vote. I just lit into her when I realized she was 20-something years old and wasn’t registered and wasn’t voting in local elections and things like that, because we have to be the change we want to see and keep the conversation alive and keep progress moving forward. Because we have to move forward, right? We can’t move backward, and we can’t stay still, so…   DE: We have to at least be a bulwark against the encroachment of the state onto the individual rights. And for a long time, they’ve been allowed to do it, kind of under the cloak of darkness. They had control of the media, the newspapers, the television, so the narrative was theirs. And so, all of the stories of injustice were word-of-mouth and almost like a conspiracy.   JF: Well, yeah, it was everybody’s Crazy Uncle Dennis, right?   DE: Right. Or they all looked so anecdotal that you couldn’t see any kind of systemic problem. But now with the Internet and with our ability to see things on a bigger level, we see this is a systemic problem. There is a problem with policy in our country that’s creating an adversarial relationship between the people and the police, and between the people and their government in general. It’s not healthy, and it’s only benefitting a tiny fraction of the people in our country, and it’s victimizing everybody else. You know, as more people become aware of it, it doesn’t mean the bad guys out there who are doing this on purpose—that are actually promoting these systems because they want power—it doesn’t mean they’re going to stop, but it does mean they have to adjust their tactics to be more palatable to us. And so the smarter we are, the more aware we are, the more outraged we get, the more they have to shrink back and say, “Okay.” So it’s this ongoing ebb and flow, this back and forth between people who want to live peacefully and people who want to aggressively live at the expense of other people. As you kind of do that, the more we know, the brighter we become, the more people are able to think rationally with good information, I think the better systems and policies that we’ll see implemented.   JF: Thank you so much, Dax. I appreciate it.   DE: I had a great time.

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

February 11, 2015 - Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://onforb.es/16Q5iFm. Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes by clicking here: http://bit.ly/ymotwitunes or on Stitcher by clicking here: http://bit.ly/ymotwstitcher. Documentary filmmaker Scott Christopherson and his directorial partner Brad Barber have been invited to premier their film at the SXSW Film Festival. The riveting film, Peace Officer, was inspired by the case of a former County Sheriff whose son-in-law was killed by the SWAT team he formed decades earlier. [Note, Christopherson is my wife's niece's husband.] Christopherson shared an early version of the completed film with me to review. It is an extraordinary documentary, as compelling as any feature film I’ve seen, outshining masters of the genre like Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore. The film is aided by a dynamic true-life character, former Sheriff William Lawrence. Commenting on the film’s controversial topic, Christopherson said, “The militarization of police is very complex and challenging. The culture of many police forces in the U.S. plays a role in how police act. There is a difference and a connection between the militarization of police and the culture of police. In many ways, those two ideas are connected. The increase in the number of SWAT raids in America since the 1970s is astonishing.” William Lawrence in Peace Officer William Lawrence in Peace Officer Barber and Christopherson are crowdfunding on Kickstarter (http://kck.st/1Gs24Vz), where it was recently named the campaign a “staff pick.” Please consider whether a friend or colleague might benefit from this piece and, if so, share it.

Almost a year ago, Radley Balko spoke to the Young Americans for Liberty at Indiana University about the Rise of the Warrior Cop. Our recorders were rolling, so take a listen to this timely, insightful discussion to arm yourself with facts in the current debate. Special Guest: Radley Balko.

#260 - Militarization of police, JP Morgan gets off easy, drones creating terrorists, and more...

#260 - Militarization of police, JP Morgan gets off easy, drones creating terrorists, and more...

The 250th edition of America's Debate Radio with Mike and Jaime. During the first hour, we discussed the House vote to repeal the health care act, and the impending expiration of the PATRIOT Act. During the second and third hours, we spoke with 3 callers and discussed unemployment, the militarization of the police, safe neighborhoods, the Tucson shootings, police investigations, and football playoffs. We welcome your feedback! Have your email read on the air-- click here to use the email form. Or, call 888.DEBATE.5 now and leave a message-- we'll play it on the next show. Thanks for listening!